Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  ‘Oh, it’s a long distance off,’ said Florence, raising her eyes from her work.

  ‘Weeks off?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Yes, dear. Many weeks’ journey, night and day.’

  ‘If you were in India, Floy,’ said Paul, after being silent for a minute, ‘I should – what is it that mama did? I forget.’

  ‘Loved me,’ answered Florence.

  ‘No, no. Don’t I love you now, Floy? What is it? – Died. If you were in India, I should die, Floy.’

  She hurriedly put her work aside, and laid her head down on his pillow, caressing him. And so would she, she said, if he were there. He would be better soon.

  ‘Oh! I’m a great deal better now!’ he answered. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean I should die of being so sorry and so lonely, Floy!’

  Dickens doesn’t simplify. And his concern, childhood being the theme, to present the essential varied and related expressions of the reality he perceives, and knows, so fully in imaginative possession, precludes, where his genius is engaged, all possibility of sentimentalizing. The privation that makes Paul so hungry for love and so devoted to Florence manifests itself also in his attachment to Old Glubb. Love frees and licenses his spontaneity – the spontaneity that is, of its nature, imaginative and creative. To repress the spontaneity in children as the Blimber academy does is to thwart and discourage life. Paul is still a living child, and he sees, among other things of importance to himself that he doesn’t mention to the academic staff, ‘lions and tigers climbing up his bedroom walls’ and ‘grim sly faces in the squares and diamonds of the floor’. The attraction of Old Glubb is that he represents, for the starved and thwarted child, the life-fostering indulgence in creative ‘wonder’ (the ‘wonder’ that Gradgrind is to deplore and ban4) for the lack of which, though knowing he will have the rationed company of Florence and love at intervals, he wilts:

  ‘What a dreadful low name!’ said Mrs Blimber. ‘Unclassical to a degree! Who is the monster, child?’

  ‘What monster?’ inquired Paul.

  ‘Glubb,’ said Mrs Blimber, with a great disrelish.

  ‘He’s no more a monster than you are,’ returned Paul.

  ‘What!’ cried the Doctor, in a terrible voice. ‘Aye, aye, aye! What’s that?’

  Paul was dreadfully frightened, but still he made a stand for the absent Glubb, though he did it trembling.

  ‘He’s a very nice old man, ma’am,’ he said. ‘He used to draw my couch. He knows all about the deep sea, and the fish that are in it, and the great monsters that come and lie on rocks in the sun, and dive into the water again when they’re startled, blowing and splashing so, that they can be heard for miles. There are some creatures,’ said Paul, warming with his subject, ‘I don’t know, how many yards long, and I forget their names, but Florence knows, that pretend to be in great distress; and when a man goes near them, out of compassion, they open their great jaws, and attack him. But all he has got to do,’ said Paul, boldly tendering this information to the very Doctor himself, ‘is to keep on turning as he runs away, and then, as they turn slowly, because they are so long, and can’t bend, he’s sure to beat them. And though old Glubb don’t know why the sea should make me think of my mama that’s dead, or what it is that it’s always saying – always saying! he knows a great deal about it. And I wish,’ the child concluded with a sudden falling of his countenance, and failing in his animation, as he looked, like one forlorn, upon the three strange faces, ‘that you’d let old Glubb come here to see me, for I know him very well, and he knows me.’

  The significance of old Glubb comes out in the way in which, though the child starts tremulously, his spontaneity asserts itself and takes charge as he gets launched on the theme of his initiation. The legends he retails may be grotesque, but there is a terrible pathos in the naïve and eager good faith with which he commits himself to the flow of the recital – terrible, because of the ‘three strange faces’, and because the reception will demonstrate the extremity of his need and the hopelessness. Later he makes a desperate appeal to Cornelia, whom he strains himself to please:5

  ‘Oh, Dombey, Dombey!’ said Miss Blimber, ‘this is very shocking.’

  ‘If you please,’ said Paul. ‘I think if I might sometimes talk a little to old Glubb, I should be able to do better.’

  ‘Nonsense, Dombey,’ said Miss Blimber. ‘I couldn’t hear of it. This is not the place for Glubbs of any kind.’

  A few pages on we have this correlative observation:

  Such spirits as he had in the outset, Paul soon lost of course. But he retained all that was strange, and old, and thoughtful in his character: and under circumstances so favourable to the development of those tendencies, became even more strange, and old, and thoughtful than before.

  The only difference was that he kept his character to himself. He grew more thoughtful and reserved, every day; and had no such curiosity in any living member of the Doctor’s household, as he had had in Mrs Pipchin’s. He loved to be alone …

  The profound, far-reaching and (disturbing to think!) representative irony of Paul’s fate was conceived by the major Dickens who, as a conscious and supremely intelligent artist, was aware both of the advance represented by what he had done and of the difficulty of completing the books as a realized, total conception at the level of what he must have known to be the magnificent and marvellously original first part. He wrote to Forster on the 19 September 1847:

  Dombey takes so much time, and requires to be so carefully done, that I really have serious doubts whether it is wise to go on with the Christmas book.

  He did go on with the Christmas book, and it was a tired Dickens, desperately needing to relax, who came back to the problem facing him; the problem of a writer who, committed to holding his immense addicted public in instalments written rapidly for the printer, was committed by his new sense of his genius to developing at the same time, if he could, an exactingly profound and pregnant conception and remaining creatively possessed by it. What we have to observe is the demonstration that he couldn’t; the defeat, in the circumstances, striking as it is by reason of the paradoxical contrast it involved, can hardly be cause for wonder. The decisive turn comes with the development of the main theme that was proposed for Dombey and Son – a development in perfect keeping, it must have seemed to the rushed, but resourceful and confidently productive, Dickens. The theme, money-pride and money-dominance as enacted by the representative Mr Dombey, now becomes that of the Bought Bride. This takes Dickens into a realm where he knows nothing. What he takes for knowledge is wholly external and conventional; determined, therefore, unresistingly by all the theatrical clichés and sentimental banalities of the high-life novelette and the equivalent drama. It lends itself congenially to the elaborations of the plot to which he is committed – villainies of the flashing-toothed villain, coincidences, sensations, reversals and melodramatic dénouement. We have the quality of his essential imaginative engagement in the pairing of Edith with a beauty in low life, a natural cousin who has a mercenary Mrs Brown for a mother to match Mrs Skewton, and who, for further link with Edith, has herself had a place in the life of the wicked Carker. Dickens means this ingeniously revealed pattern to have a serious moral significance in relation to his theme. It enables him, while observing all the Victorian proprieties, to throw the lurid light of the word ‘prostitution’, which he doesn’t bring in explicitly, on Edith’s marriage-contract with Mr Dombey.

  Alice, she also beautiful, belongs unequivocally to low life – she has just returned from some years of exile as a transported felon, but she not only maintains towards her mercenary mother the proud accusing attitude of Edith towards Mrs Skewton; she holds forth on her own position and history with a finished rhetorical eloquence indistinguishable from Edith’s. It is an eloquence that bears no relation to anything real, and that Alice, the returned convict, should speak it, and speak it (one gathers) with an educated accent, is no more absurd than that the well-born lady should. The whole business of
Edith’s ‘proud’ attitude to Dombey is unreal – as unreal as Dombey’s use of Carker for intermediary in order to humiliate her. It is impossible to make moral sense of her attitude towards her marriage, and only in the world of melodramatic rhetoric could there be any illusion to the contrary. That Dickens, yielding in response to protests, should have changed his mind and saved her ‘virtue’ at the expense of the sensationally thwarted villain adds nothing essential – it couldn’t – to the unreality. But we are to take it as a moment of high moral significance, the emotional poignancy depending on that, when, in the final meeting with Florence, Edith is able to declare herself ‘innocent’.

  That Dickens changed his mind about Walter Gay and, instead of letting him go to the bad, brought him back to marry Florence, also made no difference that mattered. The art of this Dickens runs no less, and more acceptably, to the unrealities of the happy ending (as of course to the frustration of the villain). Its spirit proclaims itself frankly here: ‘A wandering princess and a good monster in a story-book might have sat by the fireside, and talked as Captain Cuttle and poor Florence talked – and not have looked very much unlike them.’ This is only speciously an unequivocal placing note: Carker’s villainy – though he, ostensibly, represents the real world of Dombey and Son’s counting-house – belongs to the same ethos of unreality, along with the drama of his frustration. And so much of the play of Dickens’s humorous and comic abundance, even when it issues in the sinister-grotesque, serves the ends of implicit reassurance: reassurance that works by implicitly discounting the seriousness of the drama – by intimating that what we have to do with does not, at bottom, make any claim to be the world where the sanctions, conditions and inexorabilities of real life hold without remission. Personally, I find Captain Cuttle – and not only Captain Cuttle – boring. But there is an immense deal of Dickens’s comic creation that, in its genial and self-justifying liveliness and force, gives us what we acclaim as the expression of his genius, and yet, in the respect referred to, belongs with Captain Cuttle – with Captain Cuttle rather than with the Toodles. The Toodles represent what we have in the strongest part of Dombey and Son, and it is this strength that I have been intent on distinguishing. The Toodles have their essential part – and it is performed with what might strike us as an un-Dickensian economy – in an art that offers an astringent and wholly serious ‘criticism of life’.

  But I must not appear to be suggesting that, on the side of humorous creation, what goes decidedly with the supreme strength of Dombey and Son rather than with Captain Cuttle is confined to the Toodle family. The case is of course far otherwise. The book contains Susan Nipper, Mr Toots, Mrs MacStinger, Cousin Feenix – a quartet whom, in their variety, I permit myself to specify as a reminder of the actual wealth. This Dickens, compelling observer and recorder of life, there is very obvious point in describing as Shakespearian (consider the vitality – the surprisingness combined with felicity, dramatic and poetic – of the speech in which he so largely renders these characters).

  It is a commonplace that Captain Cuttle represents, in his Victorian way, the influence of Smollett, but some of Dickens’s strongest art reveals an essential kind of indebtedness to his education in the eighteenth-century masters that is an utterly different thing. This is an episode from the visit to Warwick Castle (chapter XXVII):

  ‘Ah, ma’am!’ cried Carker, stopping short; ‘but if you speak of pictures, there’s a composition! What gallery in the world can produce the counterpart of that?’

  As the smiling gentleman thus spake, he pointed through a doorway to where Mr Dombey and Edith were standing alone in the centre of another room.

  They were not interchanging a word or a look. Standing together, arm in arm, they had the appearance of being more divided than if seas had rolled between them … So unmatched were they, and opposed, so forced and linked together by a chain which adverse hazard and mischance had forged: that fancy might have imagined the pictures on the walls around them, startled by the unnatural conjunction, and observant of it in their several expressions. Grim knights and warriors looked scowling on them. A churchman, with his hand upraised, denounced the mockery of such a couple coming to God’s altar. Quiet waters in landscapes, with the sun reflected in their depths, asked, if better means of escape were not at hand, was there no drowning left? Ruins cried, ‘Look here, arid see what We are, wedded to uncongenial Time!’ Animals, opposed by nature, worried one another, as a moral to them. Loves and Cupids took to flight afraid, and Martyrdom had no such torment in its printed history of suffering.

  Again and again in Dombey we meet with this manner, a rhetoric where the moral and pictorial have been transmuted by a truly poetic imagination. While the passage quoted reminds us forcibly of the Virginia Woolf of To the Lighthouse (as do so many others of the same kind in this book), and though it consorts naturally with what is most impressive in Dombey and Son, and even, in its strong way, strikes us as characteristically Dickensian, yet the relation to Hogarth is plain. We are reminded how radically pre-Victorian Dickens was in his upbringing, education and temperament, in other matters besides his eighteenth-century tastes in art and literature. But here it is a crucial indebtedness to the eighteenth-century artist that we have to note: the indebtedness to Hogarth that is beyond question a major, if not generally recognized, fact of Dickens’s development.

  That Dickens had an intense admiration for, and real understanding of, Hogarth is on record: Forster quotes a tribute at some length in the Life. What still, oddly enough, has to be insisted on is the significance of the admiration. We hear a good deal of the influence on Dickens of Smollett, but that is a small affair, and the influence even of Fielding doesn’t amount to much compared with that of Hogarth. We can see that Dickens’s moral and creative imagination was deeply affected by Hogarth’s work, and that, striving to achieve the expression of his own vision and sensibility in an art that should convey his profoundest sense of life, he drew habitually on Hogarth; he responded intensely to him and used him creatively. Only a great original writer, a great poet, could have done with Hogarth what Dickens did; but to say that he did it with Hogarth – that in such a passage as that quoted above we have a creative adaptation of Hogarth – is plainly justifiable. And there is more in the way of Hogarthian influence to be seen in Dombey than this pointing – a proper emphasis – to passages of magnificent Dickensian prose might convey: it is surely more than a guess that the idea of Dombey’s second marriage came to him from Marriage à la Mode. In any case, Hogarth was one of the sources of life and shaping inspiration from the English past that gave Dickens, as a novelist in the English tradition, such immense advantage over any French contemporary.

  But as Dombey and Son exemplifies very copiously, he was – inevitably – Victorian. He was Victorian, pre-Victorian, and, at his greatest, a genius of a kind one doesn’t label with any adjective that – with limiting intention or not – emphasizes period characteristics. He was, in fact, in his own way, very complex. What I have been insisting on is that his way was that of a great genius, and that there is a much greater Dickens than the traditional cult has tended to recognize. Can we imagine conditions under which we might have had more of him, or had him in a ‘purer’ form? The actual Dickens, it is true, was ‘uneducated’, in the sense that he had had no such education as might have given him a maturity of critical consciousness in respect of the new art his genius was developing. But, after all, there is little point in such a speculation; for when one asks oneself what such $an education could have been there is no answer. His distinctive genius was the ability to respond freely and expansively to the inspirations of popular taste, popular tradition and the market, and, in doing so, to evolve for himself (and for the world) a high intellectual art. The evolving, in all conscience, was rapid – rapid and superlatively intelligent.

  Contemplating the diverse and disparate elements brought together into a specious unity in Dombey and Son (specious, because to be just to Dickens one must insist
that the strength represented by the early treatment of the theme of money-pride and the conventional nullity of the treatment of pride and scruple in Edith remain at odds), one asks how the confident show of unity is achieved, and is perhaps inclined to reply that it is done through the dominant resonance on the moral side of the sentimental and melodramatic – with which so much of the humour and comedy consort quite happily. An answer fairer to Dickens’s genius would be to point to the poetic conception of his art that this first elaborate novel of his gives proof of, and to the inexhaustibly wonderful poetic life of his prose. One may not feel the faintest velleity of serious response to such effects as that in which the refrain ‘Let him remember it in this room in years to come!’ figures; yet they have their place in the wonderfully varied and flexible play of what, considering the use of language, and the use of imagery and symbolism and dramatic enactment, one has to call poetic means. For the characteristic higher use of poetic means, consider this:

  The passive desolation of disuse was everywhere silently manifest about it. Within doors, curtains, drooping heavily, lost their old folds and shapes, and hung like cumbrous palls. Hecatombs of furniture, still piled and covered up, shrunk like imprisoned and forgotten men, and changed insensibly. Mirrors were dim as with the breath of years. Patterns of carpets faded and became perplexed and faint, like the memory of those years’ trifling incidents. Boards, starting at unwonted footsteps, creaked and shook. Keys rusted in the locks of doors. Damp started on the walls, and as the stains came out, the pictures seemed to go in and secrete themselves. Mildew and mould began to lurk in closets. Fungus trees grew in corners of the cellars. Dust accumulated, nobody knew whence nor how; spiders, moths, and grubs were heard of every day. An exploratory black-beetle now and then was found immovable upon the stairs, or in an upper room, as wondering how he got there. Rats began to squeak and scuffle in the night time, through dark galleries they mined behind the panelling.